The Choices We Make
by A Capite Ad Calcem
Summary: When Don begins to have misgivings about Charlie working on his most recent, brutal case, Charlie and Alan are kidnapped. When the abducters give Don a choice between his father's life or his brother's, Don must overcome his fears and work to save both.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N**-Hi. This is my first fanfiction ever. I'm pretty new to this, so please let me know how I'm doing in a review. I'd appreciate any reviews so much! Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the story.

**Disclaimer-**Not mine.

Don couldn't see. The bag which covered his head, almost completely obscured his vision. He could see nothing but vague shapes and outlines. Suddenly, the bag was pulled from his head. Don had to blink several times to adjust to the light which was now streaming into his eyes.

"Look in the window," a menacing voice spoke from his left. Don turned his neck to see who had spoken, but the speaker shoved his head in the direction of the window. Hesitatingly, Don gazed through the grimy window of what seemed to be a small wooden shack. What he saw terrified and stunned him more than anything else he had seen throughout his period of captivity. His father and brother, both tied to chairs, both with hoods over their faces.

"Dad…Charlie," Don whispered through his swollen lips.

The rough voice spoke again, "Kill them!" The man spoke harshly, and without mercy. As much as he wanted to, Don could not bring himself to say the words that he knew he had to.

He took a breath and began to say, " No, please, trade them for me…" But his voice faded away. As Don trailed away a growing realization began to take place. In this precise moment, Don knew that he was not brave enough to die for his brother and father. He was a coward. As this realization began to overwhelm him, the sound of a gunshot resounded in the air, and then faded away. Several seconds later, the sound of a second bullet clearly echoed throughout the room.

Don knew his father and brother were dead. And what was worse was he had done nothing to prevent it.

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Charlie hammered on his brother's door. "Don!" Charlie smiled to himself as he heard his brother mumbling to himself. Charlie waited several seconds and then raised his fist

and pounded yet again on the door. "Don! Get up! You have to take me to CalSci today, remember? I have to be there in twenty minutes."

Don jerked awake, panting slightly and still mumbling Charlie and Alan's names. He was both mentally and physically shaken from his dream. When he heard the door pounding again and his brother's voice, he cleared his head and focused on what Charlie was saying.

Charlie smiled as he heard Don's voice from inside, "Oh, shit. Sorry Charlie, I'll be right out." His smile faded as he caught sight of his reflection in a nearby mirror. He nervously straightened his tie and smoothed back his hair. In twenty minutes he would be giving a lecture on his most recent work in Cognitive Emergence.

Don emerged from the bedroom looking neat and put together. Charlie couldn't help but to be jealous of his always-composed elder brother. He tapped his foot impatiently and pointed to his watch. As the two men proceeded to the door, Charlie hesitated as he noticed an unnatural glint in his Don' eye. This look portrayed an emotion that Charlie couldn't quite place. He knew Don's most recent case was wearing him thin, but when he recognized the fear in Don's face, he felt a shiver pass through his body and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

Twenty minutes later Charlie was rushing into his office to get his notes for the lecture. He felt vaguely guilty for not thanking or saying bye to Don as he hurried out of the car, but quickly pushed that guilty feeling from his mind and focused on the upcoming lecture.

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Don watched his brother enter CalSci and couldn't shake the foreboding feeling that there was an imminent danger just waiting for his family.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N**-Thanks so much to the two people who reviewed! Hopefully more people would review soon….please…? Also, I was asked to make the chapters longer, so this one is a bit longer…not much though, sorry. Anyway, here's chapter two.

**Disclaimer-**Not Mine

Don began to drive from Calsci to the office when he received a call on his cell phone.

"Eppes," he answered in his usual, curt way.

"Don, LAPD just found another body," David's voice came in clearly through Don's phone.

"Okay David, give me the location and I'll be right there," Don continued speaking in his brisk, efficient manor.

David dictated the location to Don over the phone and Don hung up. He signed inwardly and shifted his hands on the steering wheel. _Is this always how it's going to be? _Don thought to himself. Brisk, efficient, stoic Donald Eppes. Maybe this explained why he still had yet to have a successful relationship. This was why a relationship would never work for him. As a high-ranking Federal agent, he could not afford to display emotions, and he definitely did not have time for the whole relationship thing. Of course that did not mean that he didn't want to…

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Charlie straightened his tie again and collected his notes in his office. Suddenly the prickly feeling on the back of his neck returned. He glanced apprehensively around his large, cluttered office. He had the strange feeling that someone was watching him. Of course, he could not see the pair of binoculars glinting in the sunlight at him from outside the window.

Charlie picked up his notes and left the office. The previously staring person outside the window moved to the lecture hall where Charlie was now heading.

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Don parked his car at the crime scene and almost immediately saw David talking to a member of the LAPD in front of a small, white-wood house. Don could not prevent a fleeting smile from crossing his face, as he realized that the only discernable characteristic of the typical-suburban house was the yellow crime scene tape and the surrounding LAPD officers.

When David saw Don he excused himself from the officer, and proceeded over to where Don stood by his car.

"John Peterson, age 25, was killed this morning. His neighbor came over to his house earlier today and found him dead in the kitchen. He was killed the same way as the other victims," David said, still using his polite, unexpressive I'm-a-cold-hearted-FBI-agent voice.

"What, with the burns and the cuts?" Don confirmed.

"Yeah, like that. Come and have a look for yourself."

Don followed the younger agent into the kitchen and saw the man who must be John Peterson on the floor. His eyes were staring and vacant, and he had been stripped to a pair of plaid boxers. As many horrendously mutilated bodies Don had seen in the past, the bodies from this case seemed to draw him more than the others. These bodies were different, they were not merely lifeless but seemed to have a macabre feel about them, the mouths twisted into humorless grins. A sudden thought occurred to Don, was he _wrong _enlisting Charlie to work his formulas and algorithms for this morbid case? Was he in fact, endangering his brother, who so eagerly spent his time and effort on so many of Don's cases.

He looked back at the corpse, and suddenly noticed with growing horror and fear that it was Charlie's head on the mangled body. The colors and shapes of the body began to twist and blur. Don felt as if an anvil had replaced his insides. He mentally shook himself, and reminded himself to remember that this was not Charlie, whose throat had been sliced to the spine and whose back had been burned so severely. It was _not_ Charlie who was laying, with his bones broken and shaped into contorted figures, on the ground. This was John Peterson, male, age 25. Another unfortunate victim of a difficult case.

"Don?" Don jerked up as he felt a hand on his forearm. He looked up to see Megan's concerned face staring into his eyes. She had her profiler look on, and he looked away, not wanting to be analyzed by her at this moment. "Don, are you alright?"

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine." She looked at him again and than left to go look around the house with the other agents. "Just fine," Don whispered after she left.


End file.
